Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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I'm Starting A Search Engine For The Fediverse (lemmy.ca)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey everyone,

This isn't an announcement, just wanted peoples thoughts on this.

I think everyone knows searching the fediverse can be better. Googling doesn't work too well, etc. So I wanted to do my part and help out.

Indexing all posts, etc is quite a lot to handle, so I wanted to start small and just focus on video search. I've started indexing videos from Peertube and other video websites. (Even YouTube but this could be removed to just focus on independent sites)

I know Peertube has their own search engine for videos. I will be reaching out to them. Compared to my site I'm planning it'll have other video sources and be easier to use.

So that leads to feedback from you guys.

What do you think about indexing videos posted on the fediverse and other independent platforms?
Are there similar services?
Am I just wasting my time?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't think an admin's permission has anything to do with it. If you post publicly on the fediverse, your posts are public. You should have the option to opt out of any indexing (just like you do for the rest of the open web). But saying its ok for you to read this post if it happens to come across your feed but you shouldn't be allowed to find it via a search is ridiculous. Users get to make the choice with each post whether its public or not, but they don't get to control how people consume those public posts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Reading a post and having a bot thrashing a server indexing everything are 2 different things. If a user used the site like that they would be throttled and if repeated afterwards, banned. It is also one thing to read/interact with a site as that adds value to the site as a whole. A bot that just mass hits links cataloging everything is just a strain on the server an Admin needs to support, with no upside for the instance, as it's a bot ingesting and no real interaction actually took place.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

and having a bot thrashing a server indexing everything

This is a completely separate argument and one that we already have mechanisms for. Servers can use status codes and headers to warn about rate limits and block offenders.

It is also one thing to read/interact with a site as that adds value to the site as a whole

A search index adds value as well; that's why this keeps coming up. And, again, there are existing mechanisms to handle this. A robots.txt file can indicate you don't want to be crawled and offenders can be IP blocked

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Should a dedicated search not use/index ActivityPub instead of the html interface?

If so, instances can simply defederate from search engine instances. So the point you are trying to make still holds.